Workshop Program

This workshop is for sysadmins who have primary responsibility for computing systems owned by government or military agencies and for sysadmins who work in secure environments, deal with classified data, provide GOTS support, or deploy to remote locations in support of government and military requirements. This includes contractors, government civilians, vendors and suppliers, uniformed members, and anyone who has a direct hands-on IT support role in the government and military sectors. Discussions will include topics like lessons learned from implementation of cloud technologies, data analytics in the government sector, and responding to policy and regulation requirements for IT and information security. This workshop is a great opportunity for sysadmins to compare notes among diverse agencies like DoD, DoE, DoC, NASA, and local governments. All workshop discussions will be strictly unclassified.

Outages and incidents are inevitable in large scale and complex systems. Fixing the underlying technical problems is a challenge, but even more challenging is identifying and fixing any underlying systemic technical or organizational issues that are making incidents more frequent, more severe, or more costly to resolve. 

This hands-on workshop will explore techniques for analyzing and learning from a set of incident postmortems to learn about what types of insights are waiting to be discovered. Postmortems and incident reports for analysis will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to bring some of their own.

LOPSA invites you to help move the practice of system administration forward. We will be running a workshop to discuss the state of system administration and what can be done to move it forward.

We are going to limit the attendance at the workshop to 15 people. Each person will be asked to provide a topic brief on a subject that they feel is important to the field of system administration. This will not be required; however, people who submit a topic brief will be given priority for acceptance to the workshop. If we have fewer than 15 briefs submitted, we will fill the remaining slots on a first-come, first-serve basis from those who did not submit briefs. Please email your briefs to george_beech@lopsa.org.

Each brief should be no more than three paragraphs, stating why the person feels this is a subject that needs to be talked about, where we are today, and how they see the topic growing in the future. Basically, it should be a primer for discussion. Discussion will be moderated by the organizer, but will be guided by the participants.

Getting everyone in your company or development team on the same page can be a challenge. This on-your-feet workshop will teach fast, fun improv techniques for helping your group to bond, generate quality ideas and make quick decisions. Learn the secrets of applied improv for business from a sysadmin/CTO who has 15+ years of experience working in open source, Internet startups and corporate training. Even sysadmins can play well with others—this workshop will show you how!

"Being the Bridge Builder: Mentoring for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations" is a workshop for anyone who wants to be a mentor, is a mentor and wants to share their experience/learn from others, or folks who want to start a mentoring program in their workplace, project, or community. This workshop will start with the role of individual technical contributors who want to mentor, and move on to more structural/organizational approaches. Something for everyone!

Administering a compute cluster in a production environment is a niche area of system administration. In addition to the common issues involved in administering *NIX computers, additional challenges related to cluster management, customer usage, and specialized software present themselves. In this workshop, we will discuss these specialized problems and potential solutions, as well as offering suggestions based on our experiences in HPC cluster management. The topics will be based on the attendees' interest but may include OS deployment, software deployment, management tools, schedulers and resource managers, and customer issues.

Attendees should be admins of a compute cluster or interested in adminning this type of cluster. They should come prepared to discuss openly, in a round table setting, their admin experiences with this class of machine and the pros and cons of their existing cluster management tools.

"Explicit Invitation: Mentoring and Community Building for Inclusion" is a workshop for anyone who wants to create greater diversity and inclusivity in their workplace, community, LUG, or open source project. We will discuss how unconscious bias shapes groups and how we can break the cycle of unintentional exclusion, and then how we can mentor each other and do more outreach to include more awesome talented people.

The LISA15 Lean IT Workshop is a gathering place for system administrators, operators, and developers to talk about the impact of Lean Manufacturing on IT practices. This half-day workshop is a discussion of the IT Manufacturing Plant analogy, approaches to applying methods therein, and success stories and lessons learned from attempts at those approaches. Attendees should be experienced individual contributors and managers who have examined some of the existing Lean literature. Attendees are expected to present or discuss on their experiences with this topic.

This workshop will focus on career skills. Participants will engage in a number of exercises and share their experiences of situations and tools that work—and don't work—for different situations we encounter at work in our career. Topics may include:

• Communication skills—in different formats and for different purposes and people
• Effective and clear decision-making
• Process improvement
• Time management and setting priorities
• Interviewing and being interviewed
• Customer service
• Teamwork and team roles
• Other topics of interest to the participants

Cyber security is an integral part of the practice of systems administration. This workshop provides a forum for security-minded system administrators and researchers to discuss current issues surrounding how systems management and security intersect. Participants select workshop topics in an open format. Learn from colleagues’ successes and get insights into security challenges you’re currently engaged in.

Potential Topics:

1. High-profile break-ins the past year: implications and impacts
2. Protecting critical digital assets, and the servers that represent single points of compromise
3. Security, privacy and the bottom line
4. Advanced persistent threat
5. Cloud security
6. Authentication best practices
7. Compliance and regulation
8. Many others as selected by workshop participants

OpenStack is a spectacularly useful cloud computing platform that's also spectacularly complex. With an upstream community that at times can seem insular and dominated by developers, it can be a hard world for someone trying to do actual work with or on OpenStack. This workshop will be an opportunity to share experiences, concerns, tips, insights, and horror stories from working with OpenStack.

This workshop will provide a forum for IT staff from higher education institutions to share ideas, concerns and experiences with peers from other institutions. Workshop leaders will have a number of topics prepared, but the bulk of the agenda will be set by the participants.

Topics and situations that are of particular concern to system administrators in higher education include:

• The Higher Ed and Higher Ed IT cultures
• Working with both centralized and distributed/independent IT organizations
• Skills to deal with the diverse and competing forces in the Higher Ed setting
• Practical ideas to improve the service and support we provide
• IT decision-making in Higher Ed
• Being effective and when the outcomes are difficult to measure; our product is the mission of the institution, accomplished by our students,
  faculty and staff
• Career advancement and moving into or out of Higher Ed
• Working with research projects, students, instructors and faculty
• Keeping tech current and relevant while maintaining significant infrastructure used by diverse and possibly unknown or unidentified user bases.